Count Smorltalk gets acronymic Not so long ago, OMT popped up in the middle of a French speech. OMG I thought. What’s OMT? Hang on, hang on. This is French, so OMT is Organisation Mondiale du Tourisme. Great, here we go then. No wait a mo. My colleague is scribbling something on the desk. What’s that? Oh right, thanks. He’s written OMT. Great. I...
Count Smorltalk takes up rocket science As I was just saying, I’m going to give up interpreting and try something a little easier. You see, I just don’t know if I can do this much longer. It’s not the interpreting. No, that’s the easy bit. Bring on the interpreting! No, it’s all the other stuff. All the stuff that has to happen before I even get...
Count Smorltalk pulls his hair out It lies in wait in at the cheese counter – Cornish Yarg? Bath Blue? Double Gloucester?… Decisions, decisions! It ambushes you in the socks department – cotton Argyles? woollen cable-knits? thermal ribbed?…. Decisions, decisions! It has you by the short and curlies in the Ford dealership –Oxford White? Sterling...
Count Smorltalk ponders up and down ”Hello Smorltalk, I hope your well.” This was the opening line of an email I received this week. It made me wonder what had happened to the rest of the sentence. I hope your well is what? Deep, perhaps? Or wet? Deep is the well of my despair for certain when I contemplate my own inability to spot typos...
Count Smorltalk gets omphaloskeptical Earlier this year I was sitting on a plane next to an Asian girl, who, rather to my surprise, started to take a series of posed photos of herself on her iPad. She would grin or gurn and snap herself on the iPad, checking on the screen to see whether the resulting image was any good. That is not something I...
Count Smorltalk does the math Just recently, I was sent a link to an article from the FT about professional salaries in London. I was made to understand by my correspondent that I should read this article. My correspondent is not a woman to be ignored. Click. Nothing. Damn, that’s why I don’t read the FT online, I remembered. I’m too stingy to pay...
Count Smorltalk feeds the trolls Trolls eat people. Giants and ogres like to eat people too. Even sweet-tempered ogresses are partial to a human or two for tea. A Count would be but a light afternoon snack. And it doesn’t really help putting up signs saying ”Please do not feed the trolls” because trolls just get so darned hungry that...
Count Smorltalk asks the question “To be, or not to be, that is the question”. That is the question? Well, if you say so. It doesn’t look or sound much like a question to me. I mean where’s the question mark for starters? I guess that the Bard himself must have had doubts about whether it was a question, so added the bit about it being “the...
Count Smorltalk hogs the microphone again Take a walk in Parc de Bruxelles this spring and you may suspect that someone is lobbing tennis balls from treetop to treetop. These balls of greased lightning zip across the sky trailing green streaks behind them like miniature comets. Blink and you miss them. As they screech overhead the sound barrier...
Count Smorltalk calls a spade a spade “Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”1 What indeed? Actually they gave us their language. Well I say gave, but of course they didn’t so much give it as impose it whilst they...